


Quartet of Seasons

by Sossity



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 18:19:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sossity/pseuds/Sossity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year in Pennsylvania.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quartet of Seasons

#### Summer.

  


"Let's take a walk," she says, "While he's working on his next move. He won't even notice, I promise, and I'd love to show you the roses in the garden."

He glances back at his partner, but the older man just waves him along without looking up from the chess board. So he opens the back door for her and follows her into the evening, into a circle of old, gnarled bushes as tall as he is. He touches a fat, dark leaf. Her hand settles above his. "Lilacs," she whispers from over his shoulder. "They've already gone by. You would have adored them, they were so beautiful. Next spring." It's a promise.

He turns to face her and finds her a little more than an inch away. She flutters off to the middle of the little garden. Startled. Nervous about something. "It's partly why we bought this house. The lilacs, I mean. Who would think you'd ever find something like this in the city?" She's too loud, too bright for the stillness around them.

"Do you want to go back inside, Mrs. Earle?" It was the polite thing to ask.

She picks at her fingernails. "Please, call me Caroline."

"Then I'm Dale." He grins and sticks out his hand. She laughs and shakes it. Her hands are stronger than they look. She turns back to the flowers before he can ask again.

The roses form a circle in the center of the circle. They are small and white and sickly. "I only planted them last year. They seem to be doing very well, don't you think?" Her voice is somehow more present than the neighbors screaming curses at each other in the next house over.

He crouches down and lifts up one of the few flowers. The petals are curling away from the center. (Strange; didn't roses usually do the opposite? The ones you sent to people always seemed to.) "Oh, yes, definitely." They look blue in the twilight. Everything looks blue in the twilight. Except for Mrs. Earle--Caroline--who is white marble. She is sitting on the single wooden bench playing with her fingers again. 

She looks up and catches him in the act of staring. A smile. Red lips, white teeth, crinkled lines. (She's closer to her husband's age than his, no matter how well she wears it.) She pats the other side of the bench. He finds a corner that isn't completely covered in bird droppings.

She takes his hand, and they are statues together.

When they return to the house, Windom Earle has made his move. He smirks smugly as Dale tries to work out the tangle he made of the board.

  


#### Fall.

  


He swings their hands as they stroll; back and forth like children at play. He _is_ a child, sometimes. He takes pieces of his world--a cup of coffee, a case, a song he'd heard--and brings them to her in cupped hands for her approval. She accepts them gravely and ties them with ribbon and puts them carefully away. 

Today it's a song as they walk down the pavement between regiments of oaks--there's a college somewhere nearby--and she sings to him for a change. " _He sends you a poem, and she's lost to you_..." He grins like a schoolboy and she thinks of letters hidden in her desk at work. 

Her song trails softly away, and she looks down to straighten the pantyhose around her knees. He sees too much sometimes. That's always been her weakness: men who really look, who can analyze the world around them and see what's really there. And what isn't there anymore. 

The air isn't cold. There's no wind to blow her away. The sun beats down exactly as it did five minutes ago. She looks back in his eyes and smiles her best girl scout smile. He returns it, his face losing some of the stress lines he's been getting lately. Sometimes she worries. A face like that can't keep secrets for long. She raises her hand and warms her palm on his cheek. He leans into it. She brushes the corner of his mouth with her thumb.

His eyes slowly scan the area around them, and he leads them to a hidden spot between a brick building and a row of junipers. They curl up around each other in the yellow grass. They kiss with lips and tongues and throats and hands and fingertips until the big church clock strikes one. They separate somehow and stride purposefully in opposite directions back to their respective lives, only slightly late for work.

  


#### Winter.

  


Her bones are frozen, and they're getting ready to snap. 

Even Dale's _cool moonlit naked beautiful human_ body can't thaw her. He's a furnace on her skin, an acetylene torch to her _mouth neck breasts stomach thighs cunt_ but she's ice inside and he can't come near it. She kisses his lips and they turn blue, runs her hands down his _chest abdomen back_ and raises goosebumps. She's dead on ice in this motel room morgue but her body hasn't heard the news, refuses to stop _moving sweating keening touching sucking sliding_ as headlights through the window flash inside her head like a strobe light like a seizure like a _laughing mocking cawing wrong_ voice gouging great bloody ditches where her heart should be but there's only ice, ice, ice wrapped around flesh wrapped around meat _can't beat can't thump can't breathe_ black jagged ice over red under tires screaming fire can't stop

_Hot diggety dog diggety boom, what you do to me_

They sent him down south on vacation, somewhere hot and exotic, where he wouldn't get hurt. He wanted to take her with him but she just laughed. Laughed. Because it hurt. " **Dale, don't you think he'd figure out something was up if we took off to Mexico for the week?** " " **I don't care, Caroline.** " There was something cold and hard in the back of her mouth _like a pea, princess, can you feel it can you swallow_ " **How can you not care?!** " " **I'm sick of hiding in the shadows.** " If she shouted, if she lacerated her throat raw, she could spit enough out to breathe around it " **Dale!** " " **I love you, Caroline, and I'm not afraid to say it.** " it was growing big too big " **How could you possibly love me?** " " **How could I possibly not?** " " **How can you say that when my husband--** "

**When your husband what?**  
      **You don't know what he'd do**  
 **He wouldn't break**  
      **Oh he would he would**  
 **He'd let us go**  
      **You don't know him**  
 **He's my partner**  
      **He'd kill us both**  
 **He's an FBI agent for God's sake**  
      **It doesn't matter**  
 **Please I love you I can't bear to be without you I can't do this anymore I'm cracking like glass**  
      **I can't oh my darling my beautiful Dale Cooper oh I can't oh oh**  


And so it ended. 

He had icicles dangling from his eyelashes and her esophagus was frozen solid and she couldn't shout anymore  
Couldn't feel  
Couldn't hurt  
Couldn't speak

" **Caroline.** "

Could barely whisper

"i love you."

" **Then why, just tell me why.** "

"i love him too."

_Boom  
What you do to me_

She would look out the window at the lilac bushes and their twisted bare branches. She would see him standing at the edge of some distant ocean staring toward a stunning jeweled sunset, his feet washed by the salt water and sinking into the deep, wet sand. 

And then she'd turn back to the chess board and the gnarled elven man keeping watch and she would smile like the good girl, good hostess, good actress she was.

_What you do to me_

At night all night every night she paced the endless rooms of her dreams and talked to her dream people and wondered why it seemed more real than her perfect house and her perfect husband and her perfect job. 

Every night she watched the chess board checkerboard floor (red and black and red and black and red and black) bleed and warp into _sharp bitter crooked_ lines (red and black and red and black). They changed a little each time she dreamed, until the tiles were and always had been crisp zigzags (red and black).

All night she would trade riddles with the dwarf and the giant and the lady and Those Who Have Come Before and Those Who Never Were and Those Who Will Be. (But never with Those Who Have Left, because she couldn't reach them.) Dale was there is there will be there will be gone. He was older, much older. She reveled in it, knowing it would be the only time she saw him this way. Sometimes they lay down together and _loved stayed touched saw_ until their blood mingled on the floor.

At night, she lived.

When morning came ( _April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs, out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain_ ), she died.

  


#### Spring.

  


"It is May 16th, 1979, just after dawn; over two weeks since Caroline's passing. I am still lying in my hospital bed. If I tilt my head, I can see out the window. I appear to be on the first floor, as there are plants growing just outside my room. If I'm very careful... _grunt rustle grunt thud_...agh! There we go...the window is now open. It smells as though it had rained during the night, and yes, I can see drops of water on the leaves of the bushes. They are lilac bushes, by the way. The flowers have started to rust, but they still smell quite strong. It's a very pleasant smell, and the flowers themselves are as beautiful as Caroline always said.

"I think I hate them."


End file.
